In the last decade, progress in radio and VLSI technology has fostered the widespread use of radio communications in consumer applications. Portable devices such as mobile radios, PDAs, pagers, and mobile computers can now be produced having acceptable cost, size and power consumption. Radio communication systems for personal usage differ from radio systems like the public mobile phone network because they operate in an uncoordinated environment. These radio communications systems require an unlicensed band enabling personal devices to work anywhere in the world with a suitable system capacity. One radio band meeting this requirement is the ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) band at 2.4 GHz, which is globally available. The band provides 83.5 MHz of radio spectrum. One example of a short range radio technology particularly suited for personal applications within the ISM band is the Bluetooth wireless technology. Bluetooth provides an air interface designed for operation in the ISM band and lends itself to providing low cost, low power implementations for radio. Using the Bluetooth wireless technology, personal devices may be connected in an ad hoc fashion.
As technologies like Bluetooth become widely deployed, the possibility of different types/classes of applications running from different devices attempting to share the same radio channel becomes highly likely. The passing of unrelated traffic through a shared channel is likely to have a heavy influence on each traffic stream's delay, jitter and packet loss. Some types of traffic, for example, TCP connections carrying e-mail, tolerate latency better than they tolerate packet loss. However, other types of traffic, for example, streaming video or audio, prefer shorter delays over “no loss”. To enable co-existence of these seemingly different types of services, the radio protocols are expected to offer reasonable QoS guarantees. Thus, there is a need for a multi-service environment wherein traditional bursty traffic such as file transfers, e-mails or web browsing may share the same radio channel as traffic with more rigorous latency, jitter and/or packet loss requirements, such as voice. Thus, there is a need for a method for mapping the general QoS parameters provided by an application into a set of radio-specific elements.